


Finding Destiny

by waterbird13



Series: Growing Old [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Group Bonding, Introspection, Nile Freeman-centric, Nile's POV, Processing, background Joe/Nicky, dealing with immortality, finding a role, three months post movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25815733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterbird13/pseuds/waterbird13
Summary: “We usually have a thing that we care about. Fights we’ll seek out, things we’ll get involved in. Some of them last forever, some of them change based on the century. I know mine, and I know Joe’s and Nicky’s. Just yours left to learn.”Nile's introspections on what it means to become an immortal being.
Series: Growing Old [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1876672
Comments: 26
Kudos: 259





	Finding Destiny

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, everyone! This is my first Old Guard fic, and I'm so so excited. I love this movie!
> 
> This is a Nile introspection piece. This is born out of a need to see Nile grapple with what the hell it means to be immortal a little bit more, because immortality and death in general are almost too big for human brains to really process properly. 
> 
> This is also a team bonding fic, because those are great. Lastly, it's me trying to write a fic all about Nile's agency. She's not being trained or guided; she's given information and she's making choices, while also being part of the team.
> 
> Warnings below:
> 
> 1\. Nile is thinking a lot about what it means to be immortal. Her introspection isn't bad or necessarily frightening, just...the idea of living forever is both a lot, and requires some reflecting on death and the nature of death and the nature of living. Nile thinks about death and fairness a bit.
> 
> 2\. At one point, Nile very briefly discusses cutting herself, not as a self-harm technique but rather as a way to reassure herself that this is all real. It is a one brief paragraph mention, and she does not do any actual cutting in the fic.
> 
> 3\. Andy, Joe, and Nicky all talk about various ways they can use their gifts, many of which would involve them getting hurt in various ways. This is still a lot more mild than actual canon.
> 
> I hope you enjoy! Please let me know what you think.

They’re back at Copley’s place, which Andy has griped about plenty. She doesn’t like going to the same place twice, particularly not a place where they were identified and hurt. But Copley has information about a job, and Andy trusts digital means of communication even less than she does Copley’s house, so they go.

Still, Nile thinks Copley should be prepared for Andy to bully him into moving sometime soon.

Nile drifts away from the conversation, which has shifted to travel arrangements. They’re headed to Australia. She doesn’t need to know the  _ how _ s _ ,  _ not when it’s going to happen either way, and she doesn’t have anything to add to the discussion. No drug-runner pilots, no contacts, no preferred pilots, not even some frequent flyer miles to offer up.

She finds herself back at the wall of crazy, looking over Copley’s research. He targeted mostly the past one hundred fifty years, but he has old paintings he argues are Joe and Nicky in the crusades, old Greek legends he argues are about Andy. Maybe they are. She honestly can’t tell anymore, when it comes to what’s real and what’s myth.

What captivates her today isn’t the amount of time or even the successes Copley has pinpointed, the incalculable lives saved, the specific ripples in the world he could track down by their sheer magnitude. Today, she sees the places. The sheer, overwhelming volume.

She’s getting good at noticing Andy when she sneaks up on her, although Nile doesn’t so much think it’s practice as an affection thing. Andy’s family knows she’s coming. Andy gives them that warning. And, even after only three months, Nile is somehow family.

That’s something that is simultaneously so welcome and so deeply painful she doesn’t think about it much. Maybe in five, ten, fifty, a hundred years she’ll be ready to examine that.

So she’s not surprised when Andy gently bumps their shoulders, leaving them a breath away from each other, brushing when either one of them moves at all. “What do you see?”

Nile’s having trouble taking in specific details, honestly. “You’ve done…a lot,” she manages.

Andy snorts. “I’m older than written history, Nile. Even Joe and Nicky…a lot happens that history books forget. This is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Right. Nile is going to pack that away and firmly not come back to it for a century. Maybe then she’ll really be able to understand what time means to these people.

Even just thinking of herself alive to reflect on this a hundred years from now seems hypothetical, a thought exercise that can never come true.

Sometimes, Nile still has to cut herself to prove that this isn’t some delusion she’s having. She knows the others know. They seem to understand, even if they probably are too old to remember that thought.

Andy seems to be taking some of the images in. “We have done a lot,” she allows. She brushes their shoulders again. “You…you helped me remember that.” She smiles at a picture of Joe, holding some baby. “I remember that. She wouldn’t let him go. Pulled his beard something awful, too.” Her eyes catch on another one, herself with a group of women. This time, she doesn’t explain, but she smiles.

Nile watches her now, instead of the images. 

There’s footfalls through the doorway. It’s Nicky, Nile knows, instinctively, some part Marine training, some part continuous close contact making her sharp. He doesn’t come in, doesn’t even call out to them. From the sound of it, he’s on the phone, pacing the hallway while he talks in quick German.

Andy straightens up anyways, and looks over to Nile, managing a smile. “You’ll have to find your thing,” she says.

“My thing?” They’ve had this conversation about  _ her thing _ when it comes to weapons already, asking if she intends to learn anything more than firearms. She’s taken to carrying knives, and practicing when they have time. Nicky’s given her a few lessons with his sniper rifle, something she never got the opportunity for before. But she doesn’t have a  _ thing _ , a signature piece, like they all do.

Hell, treading back into topics she firmly doesn’t think about, maybe one day she’ll be so old that guns will be obsolete weaponry. Everyone will use lasers and here she will be, showing up to a laser fight with a handgun. Then she’ll be just as archaic as they are.

Andy nods, though. “We all have a  _ thing _ ,” she explains. “Usually a couple. The thing we care about. It’s not all straight-up war, Nile. In fact, it rarely is ever that anymore. The world has changed a lot…” Andy’s eyes look haunted for a moment, but she doesn’t allow herself to dwell in it. Ever since Merrick’s Labs, Nile’s noticed her doing this. Pushing through. Not allowing herself to dwell in misery like she did for those scant hours Nile knew her before.

Andy continues. “And it’s not all ops like what we’re talking about here, either. K&R is all well and good, and we’re uniquely capable of dealing with it, but we do more than that.” Probably seeing that Nile still isn’t getting it, she clarifies. “We usually have a  _ thing _ that we care about. Fights we’ll seek out, things we’ll get involved in. Some of them last forever, some of them change based on the century. I know mine, and I know Joe’s and Nicky’s. Just yours left to learn.”

“Like what?” 

“I’m big on human trafficking jobs,” Andy says, voice pitched low and something dark and a little terrifying in her eyes. Maybe Andy will tell her if she asks—she does, sometimes, although not always, unlike Joe and Nicky who almost always tell her anything she asks—but she’s not sure if she’s prepared to talk about it right now. “Human trafficking rings pop up, and we take them out. Joe and Nicky…well, they’ve got a lot of things. Bleeding hearts and all. But they’re particularly big on religious persecution.” She closes her eyes and gives a small, slightly bitter smile. “Tell the truth, I think they’d half-cooked up a plan they put on hold because of this”—she gestures to herself—“and I’ll need to kick their asses to remind them that’s not how we do things.”

Nile snorts, can’t help it, and that draws a real smile out of Andy. Andy, who is mortal, who can  _ die _ —Nile’s brain still can’t accept it, although she’s not sure if she can’t accept that Andy can die or if she can’t accept that she ever could not—can and absolutely does kick all their asses on a regular enough basis. As Booker said, she’s forgotten more ways to kill than whole armies will ever learn. 

Which reminds her. “And Booker?” She winces after she says it, hears the challenge in her voice. She can’t quite get over Booker being gone, even if she mostly understands. Maybe it’s just that a hundred years is too much for her to really get. Maybe it’s just that he clearly was so lost.

Andy doesn’t flinch, though, and looks her dead-on when she answers. “Booker…tell you the truth, Booker didn’t have much of a thing. He’d go along with what we wanted. Maybe not pushing him to have a thing was the issue. Maybe we’re supposed to have one to make this life worth it.”

“Like Nicky says. It’s destiny?” Nile asks.

Andy snorts, then clasps her shoulder in one hand. “Sure thing, kid. Maybe we are dragged here for a purpose. Maybe we’re given this extra time for that. And when it’s over…” Andy shrugs, and Nile doesn’t press. It doesn’t take a genius to think that the woman  _ older than recorded history _ might be grappling with what it means to die. Nile doesn’t agree with her assessment, can’t think of Andy having fulfilled her destiny, some purpose she’s set for herself. Not when Andy still charges into every battle fearlessly, full of determination to right wrongs and save lives. Not when Andy, knowing full well she’s mortal and knowing better than any mortal how much dying hurts, draws the robber in the corner store’s attention onto her to take it from the poor terrified cashier until she disarms the man, just last week.

But death is complicated, and ugly. If people got to stick around until they fulfilled their destiny, then her Dad certainly wouldn’t have died before she and her brother grew up. 

In some ways, eternal life is simpler. She’s here, somehow, for some amount of time. She should do something about it.

Andy seems to be thinking along the same lines. She squeezes Nile’s shoulder. “So you should start thinking about what destiny dragged you here for.”

The plane they’re on is, thankfully, not running drugs. Nile knows that her standards need to change now. As Andy says, sometimes you work with people you don’t want to eat with. But she still has some standards.

Instead, it seems to be someone who owes Nicky a favor, and views them all with a—probably healthy—amount of fear.

They’re mostly left alone on the intolerably long flight to Perth. Immortals apparently do boredom really well. Not only do they seem to always be prepared for it—weapons to clean, books to read, sketches to complete, quiet conversations to hold—but they all can seemingly sit perfectly still in terrible silence better than anyone she’s ever seen.

Nile is…not there yet. She tried listening to music, an old go-to, but it’s not doing much today. She tries to sleep, another thing they seem to have mastered that she hasn’t. Just when she’s about to try pacing, which she knows is not the best idea on a moving plane, Nicky and Joe plop down across from her.

Nile notes, somewhere in the back of her mind that notices stupid things, that they don’t do up their seatbelts. And then she realizes they probably judge her a bit for leaving hers on this whole time, because what does it matter? The plane could go down and the three of them would walk away, seatbelt or no seatbelt. 

“You talked to Andy today about purpose,” Nicky begins.

There are  _ no boundaries _ with these people, practically no private conversations, very few secrets when it comes to Nicky and Joe. It’s not bad just…an adjustment. It’s not like she could have any secrets in the Marines, either, but this is different. This is forever, and, more importantly, willingly given, not just a product of where they are.

All that to say is that she knows they probably heard, and she’s not entirely surprised they bring it up. “Yeah.”

“Any ideas yet?”

She shrugs. “It’s a lot to think about, you know?” She thought she was going to finish in the Corps, head home, go to college. Probably give in and get a “practical” degree, although Art History still called to her. Maybe get married, have a couple kids. It’s a lot to think that her world has moved so far from that standard.

“Mhm,” Joe agrees, although she’s not sure he really does know anymore. “We just…we know what Andy told you. And we wanted to add to it.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You are good for more than fighting,” Nicky says. “You’re an accomplished fighter, and if you stay with us, you will be that. Grow better, even.”

“But not every purpose we’re equipped for means picking up a gun,” Joe continues, handing the conversation off, back and forth, in the steady, almost reassuring way the two of them have. “Sometimes, we’re the ones who tend to the sick, because we cannot be killed by disease. Hold hands in hospitals, administer aid. Pray with the dying. That sort of thing.”

This is coming from two men who survived the Black Death, and AIDS, and everything else in between, and Nile can picture it. Can picture it so clearly.

“Or we can search for the missing, because no matter the situation they’ve found themselves in, we can survive it,” Nicky continues. “Can track someone for years, when the rest of the world moves on, sometimes.”

“Sometimes, we’re the first in a warzone, after the fighting, ready to bring food and medical supplies and aid, because it doesn’t kill us if we get in the middle of a war. Sometimes we’re the human shields because no matter what they do, they can’t kill us.”

“Sometimes we’re just…the witnesses. We can do our best not to forget.” A losing battle, Nile knows. Time takes and it leaves and Andy’s already told her how ugly that is.

Nile swallows, a little overwhelmed. They must see it, because they each take one hand and squeeze. “It doesn’t matter what you choose,” Joe says. “And it’s a choice you can re-make, again and again, at any time. We’ll support you.”

“Think of it like this,” Nicky offers, “You have been gifted with eternity. To try and try again. To do anything you ever once wished you could. Sometimes, that means travel, or studying. Sometimes it means standing between someone else and a bullet. But why you do that, that is up to you.”

“And we’ll support you,” Joe adds, perhaps a bit unnecessary, considering the fact that they’re having this conversation in the first place. “That’s what we do for each other.”

“The real reason we have those dreams.”

Nile manages a smile. “It’s like destiny.”

“Exactly,” Nicky says, one sharp nod.

“Would you like us to stay? Or leave you alone? You have time before we land, and—“

“Stay. Please.” They’re still holding her hands.

Joe makes an agreeable humming noise, and they sit in a silence somehow much more comfortable than earlier.

Nile looks out the window. She doesn’t know what’s next, not beyond this job in Australia. She couldn’t answer  _ “where do you see yourself in five years?” _ For a job interview right now, let alone fifty. A hundred.

A thousand.

But she feels Joe and Nicky’s hands in hers, and Andy sitting a few chairs away, pretending she wasn’t listening, and she starts to get that destiny and eternity are about two things.

The first is the people. Obviously, always. They can die, they  _ will _ die, but they have been brought together for a reason.

And destiny and eternity are about baby steps. She made the decision to go back for Andy. She made the decision to stick around. She made the decision to be here, today, to leave behind the world she knew.

And she has time to figure out what her next decision is.


End file.
